Lesson Tag: broken linkbuilding

In this video I discuss:

• How this template compares to the one used for the Skyscraper Method
• How to use this template (download link in Lesson A1.8) manually vs. how to do it using MailShake, Woodpecker, or another cold outreach automation tool

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

A1.9 How to Use the “Done for You” Template for Broken Linkbuilding Transcript Below

Okay!

Now that you know what broken linkbuilding is, you know how to do it, where to find the links, I’m going to walk you through really quickly how to use the “done for you” template for broken linkbuilding.

You’re going to find, again, that it’s just like the Skyscraper template, but with a few small tweaks. It works the exact same way – where we have a template written in Microsoft Word that you can copy-paste into email, or you can just use that template with a third party tool, and the fields are pulled over from the columns in the spreadsheet.

I’ve mentioned this in the Skyscraper method, I’m going to repeat it, I’m not including any affiliate links, I’m not trying to make more money by telling you this, just it’s for your own good, you will save hours upon hours.

I wish there were a better way to automate collecting all of the information, but at the very least, you can automate the outreach by going with the tool I discussed in the Skyscraper method. These tools change constantly so you can just google email outreach tools, email outreach automation, cold email automation, cold email tools and find the most up-to-date ones.

As I record this video, Woodpecker.co and MailShake.com are both really, really good ones. Right now, they’re reasonably priced. Over the years, the pattern I’ve seen is: it will all start off reasonably priced and they’ll get really, really, really expensive, and then new competitors move in that do the same thing for much less, and the cycle starts all over. That’s why I say you may have to google it.

I still really, really recommend using those because using these templates with automated tools, they work just as well. But if you’re doing it all manually, it’s just so much manual, tedious work that you can cut out for $20, or $30, or $40 a month.

Let’s take a quick look at the template that we were just looking at and filling out in the other video.

I’ve just got a placeholder here: StoppingScams, just to show you how this works. But we filled out a couple of others as well.

The way this is going to work… I’m going to close this down really quick and open it back up so that it populates with all of the fields we just filled out in the last video.

You’ll get a few prompts, you just have to close through them all. And then, you’ll get this opened up. It’s automatically linked to the spreadsheet that’s in the same folder.

If you move these things to a different folder, their link is going to break. You’re going to have to link them back up by hitting select recipient list, get list, open data source, and you’re going to have to hunt down the file.

Just out of the box, they should work really well, as long as you keep them wherever they downloaded to on your computer.

This is what it all looks like.

We’ve got all of this over her. I still need to delete this column out of here. We’ve got all of this in here. You can preview it just by clicking this button right here: “View Merged Data”. And now, it’s filling out the information.

It says:

Hey, Ian!

I was looking for resources about free ways to get traffic about an hour ago, and I found your page of free traffic resources (link to the page) was incredibly helpful! Thank you for putting it together!

I noticed a small problem though – there’s a broken link within your resources”

• Broken Link Label: (the actual URL)

What I’ve put in this field is to help you see what you need to fill out. This is how this field should be filled out to populate this way.

If you just put the broken link URL, that’s okay too. But in the message, it won’t make it as easy for them to see which link it is whenever they go back to their resources page and try to find it, try to track it down.

I just thought, you might like to know on case you didn’t already.

You would sign your name. You don’t actually sign your name. Put your actual name.

P.S. I’m sure you get requests like this all of the time, but I’d be honored if you’d consider adding one of my site’s resources to that page while updating the broken link above!

I recently published (you would link your resource here – you would not only put the title of the resource, but you would make it an actual link before you carry this template over to either the email you’re going to send or to the automation tool you’re using), and I think you’ll find that it’s a great addition to your already incredible list of resources!

If not, I completely understand – no hard feelings. Keep up the great work!

And then, I’d say, probably somewhere around 4 or 5 days later, there’s a follow up message that you could use as well.

Again, if you’re using an automated tool, you would just use this section because the automated tools automatically send your follow up messages as a reply, so you wouldn’t have to include your original message as part of the template. The tool that you’re using should automatically do that.

But if you’re doing this all manually and you’re just taking this all, you’re copying it, and then you’re pulling it over to Gmail or to your preferred mail client, pasting it, send. And then you would come up here and you would say: “okay, next person”.

Interesting. I guess I hadn’t saved yet. Sorry about that. Small hiccup.

So, I’m going to save that and re-open this again so that you can see how this actually works.

This is the prompt word saying: “hey, from the spreadsheet, what sheet do you want to pull this from? What cell range do you want to pull from?”

So we’ve got it back in here. Now we would click the preview again. It goes through to the second entry. And now we have: “Hello, Atlantic Tattoo Removal!”, or we have “Hello, TatAway.com Editors!”.

Or this could also just be, depending on how you put it in here, you could just say: “TatAway Editors”, “TatAway.com Editors”, whatever. I was looking for resources about tattoo removal…

If you’re doing this manually, you would just copy this, take it over to your email client, paste it, send, next one.

Just as I said with the Skyscraper method, do not use your actual Gmail address or your email address from your website’s domain. Create a new Gmail account to do this. Just in case you get some kind of penalty for spam.

If you’re doing a good job with these outreach messages and you’re not just shotgunning them, that shouldn’t really become an issue. But just in case it is, we don’t want to damage your existing email accounts that you actually use for everyday business.

We certainly don’t want your domain, in my case it would be RueTattoo.com, if too much spam get sent from that domain, it can essentially cause email clients to start to punish that domain, to blacklist that domain, and associate that domain with spam – which makes it much harder to get into people’s inboxes. That is not something we want.

Long story short: just create a new Gmail account whenever you’re doing outreach. Just create a Gmail account, use it only for outreach, nothing else. In that way, if it ever gets penalized, you can just open another Gmail account, do it all over again.

That’s how the template works. If you’re doing it manually, you would just scroll through these. And if, ideally, you’re using one of the automated tools, you would just upload this spreadsheet. Very straightforward. Every tool makes it very easy. You would map the fields in the template to the spreadsheet and then it would just automatically send all that information out for you.

I highly recommend those anytime I’m doing outreach for links or anything else, some kind of promotion, I’m absolutely using one of those tools because otherwise, it’s just way too tedious and hard to keep up with.

That’s that.

I hope it wasn’t at all too fast pace for you. I think it’s probably pretty clear. It’s daunting to think about starting it, but again, it is just so worthwhile to do these things.

I cant recommend highly enough that you put in the effort here because this is so powerful for search engine optimization and getting rankings a lot faster.

Again, the Skyscraper method is definitely the better of the two, I would say, but this is also a really good method – which is why I teach it here.

If you have any questions, as always, feel free to post them to the Facebook group. Otherwise, I hope you feel how well this stuff is setting you up for success. I will keep putting it together as much as I can.

If I don’t see you in the Facebook group, I will just see you in the next video.

Talk to you then.

In this video I discuss:

• What you’ll need to find broken links on “links” & “resources” pages
• Which search phrases to use to find broken links
• A step-by-step look at this process and how to compile the contacts you want to request links from
• An introduction to the “Done for You” spreadsheet and outreach template I’ve created for you, which you can download here >>

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

A1.8 How to Find Resources & Links Pages with Broken Links Transcript Below

Okay!

So, now that you know what we’re doing, you need to know how to do it – kind of essential.

In this video we’re going to talk about how to find resources and links pages with broken links on them.

There are a handful of things you’re going to need. The first thing you’re going to need is time. This is definitely a time-consuming process because even once you find the links or resources pages, which I’m going to show you how to find them fairly easily, but it can still take some digging.

You still will find plenty that don’t have any broken links on them or the broken links that they have on them may not be totally relevant. It definitely takes a while to compile this list, just like it did for the Skyscraper method except there are two differences.

The nice thing about broken linkbuilding is that there are no premium tools required. Everything you need to build these links is totally free.

The other difference would be it definitely takes more time to find links through broken linkbuilding, I’d say, than through the Skyscraper method.

Because Skyscraper method, you kind of pull up a list of someone’s backlinks, and you can go boom, boom, boom, boom, and fill them out. It’s still tedious. Especially looking up the name and all of that information, filling out that spreadsheet totally. But at the same time, it’s fast. It’s a little bit faster than broken linkbuilding.

Both are really good, both result in really powerful links. Yes, they’re both time-consuming, but they also both have very high payoff if you see things through and actually put in the legwork.

So the first thing you’re going to need is time. The other things you’re going to need are Google (just the search engine), and a Google Chrome extension called “Check My Links”. Also, inherently, that means that you need to have Google Chrome installed on your computer.

What we’re going to do in Google is we’re going to search phrases like your NICHE + (in this exact string, with no spaces) inurl:links – that won’t change. The niche in all caps there will change but the inurl:links will not change.

And the same thing for this: you would just put NICHE + inurl:resources. What this search string does is it’s searching your niche as the keyword.

The example I’m going to be going through in this video is tattoo removal, assuming sticking back to the original site in the FIMP training, RueTattoo. So it’s tattoo removal + inurl:links.

What that’s doing is it’s looking for websites and pages on the internet that have to do with tattoo removal. And in the URL of that page, it has the word links somewhere or it has the word resources somewhere. And if I remember, I’ll point that out when we hop in to actually looking at this.

You can search for these, just generally without the “inurl” code. You can search tattoo removal + links, tattoo removal + resources. You’ll get a lot more results, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not going to be as targeted and as pinpointing as using the inurl string as part of your search.

The other thing is: say for example, tattoo removal – once I went through tattoo removal, I could change up the keyword that I used for searching to. I could say tattoo removal cream, I could just say tattoo, generally, I could say laser tattoo removal. We can mix that keyword up and get some different results to help fill out the spreadsheet more.

But of course, again, if you’re trying get 30, 40, 50, 60+ of these in a spreadsheet, it’s going to take a few hours of work. But, again, it’s worth it. These backlinks are worth it if you put in the time to get them.

We’re going to hop over here and I’m going to take a look at some of this. I’ve done a little bit of legwork. Typically, I try not to pull too much on screen for these videos before I do them because I want to give you an accurate representation of what the process looks like, but at the same time, this is so time-consuming. I felt like it was a little bit monotonous and not very helpful for you to see the process.

But I’ll show a little bit of it either way. I’ve got a handful of things pulled up here. Of course, the first thing is the Check My Links extension. I have already added it to Chrome. It will put this little button up here in the top right corner. That’s all it is.

Totally free extension. If you just google Check My Links extension, Check My Links Google Chrome extension, you’ll find this. And this is what it should look like. It’s very highly reviewed.

After you’ve installed that extension, you would start searching. You can see the exact string that I’ve used here. I’ve used tattoo removal + inurl:links. I think, I’m on page 2 it looks like right now.

I’ve pulled up a few from page 1 and a handful from page 2 as well. We can see links is in the URL here, we can see links is in the URL here, this is exactly what we’re looking for in links.

The same thing for resources. I will say that in my experience, the links search is going to bring up more relevant results, but resources is also helpful. You can also play with other words here that you would like to see in a resource or you would frequently see in a resources or links page as part of the URL.

In my experience, these are definitely the two most worthwhile. And links, by far, is more worthwhile than resources. But I wanted to show you both of them.

Of course, like I said, you can just change this to tattoo, you can change this to laser tattoo removal, you can change this to tattoo removal creams, you can change this to tattoo removal reviews. All of those are going to change your results a little bit, but of course it’s also going to be helpful because it’s going to give you more pages to link from.

You’ll also know that I’ve activated the Moz bar as we go through a lot of this. With the Moz bar, you’re going to be able to see the page authority of most of these pages. For the most part, they’re going to be reasonably, decently authoritative. It depends on your niche, of course, but a lot of the ones I see here are hovering or around PA 20. The domain authority is even higher for some of them.

Typically, again, these are going to be very worthwhile links. I’d say you can discount the ones that say PA 1, but at the same time, sometimes Moz bar just has a fluke and it doesn’t accurately pull up the page authority for one of these pages.

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to this. It adds in another factor that you have to keep mindful of and it just makes the whole thing much more tedious and complicates it more.

I would say for these particular links, of course, when we looked at the Skyscraper method, we only wanted high-authority pages. All of these links, I would say most of them are going to be authoritative anyways, all of them are going to be relevant as long as you’re using the right search phrases.

I wouldn’t say that you need to keep too close of an eye on the page authority as you’re pulling these onto your list. It’s certainly helpful if you do, it’s just more tedious and it complicates things more.

Personally, I’m going to say if I were doing it, I wouldn’t pay a whole lot of attention because most of them are going to be authoritative enough anyways. It just complicates things unnecessarily. Whenever that’s the case, I’m not going to do it, personally.

I’ve pulled up a handful of these from these results. You could see them here. You could see all of the good links are highlighted in some shade of green. Either they’re totally valid or they are redirecting correctly. But you’ll see the invalid links are pulling up highlighted red.

If I refresh this page, you’ll see that nothing’s highlighted. What you have to do is you have to click the Check My Links extension and it just goes through really quickly and it checks all the links, highlights the bad ones, highlights the good ones.

This right here is a bad link. We’re not going to write the people that own this site. We’re not going to write BadTattoos.com and say: “hey, you got a broken link on AtlanticTattooRemoval.com.” What we want to do is we want to reach out to the people at AtlanticTattooRemoval. We would want to find their contact information.

I’m going to start pulling these into the spreadsheet for example next time. So, I just took the URL of the page on their site, and we’ll go over this more in-depth in the next video where I walk you through the done-for-you tools.

The other thing is we want to take note of the bad links. I’m going to right click it (two finger click on a Mac), and I’m going to go copy link address,and I’m going to paste the link there, I’m going to give it a label too. I’m going to say: Bad Tattoos. That will make sense again more in the next video.

Article Topic: tattoo removal.

Actually, we don’t need this in this particular spreadsheet, so leave that one blank because that’s covered by the broken link. I’m just going to delete this out of there.

We would need to go to AtlanticTattooRemoval and we would want to find their contact information. So, Contact us. There we go – info@atlantictattooremoval.com. And if we couldn’t find their name, which is probably going to be the case for this particular website, I don’t even see an About us.

What you can do here if you don’t have a name is you can just put the company name. You can also put something like company name, website name + editor – something along those lines. Just use your best judgment there.

Since we’re just doing this example really quick, I’m just going to put Atlantic Tattoo Removal and I’m going to put their domain: AtlanticTattooRemoval.com.

Again, that’s the time-consuming part of this process – is you would go through here and anywhere you found a bad link, you would take down this information. Of course, we took down the URL, we took down the company name, we’ve found their email address, etc.

You’ll see how that all comes together in the next video. But I want to walk you through a few more examples to show you obviously every page you pull up is not going to have bad links, unfortunately.

I would say it’s usually somewhat close if you’re pulling up a really good search on Google, at least somewhere between 20% and 30% of these pages is going to have a bad link, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less.

The majority, I would say, of pages you pull up are not going to have bad links, and that’s okay. You don’t do anything with those. You just close them down.

Like this one too has a bad link. This is another one I pulled up from the tattoo removal + inurl:links search. We can see here that on this page, under Friday Links & the Beauty of MindBody, we have Tattoo parties raise the risk of health complications. It’s a 404 link, that page is no longer there. It can’t be found.

It looks like this should link to an article but it doesn’t. We would just take all this stuff again (the URL), we would drop into the links/resources page URL. We could say: tattoo parties raise a risk of health complications, and then I’m going to paste the link there. It’s a long link but it’s a link.

We would just fill the rest of this out. This, again, would be tattoo removal. Page of tattoo removal resources would be the same. Article URL is blank – I’ll actually delete this before I upload the spreadsheet for you all. We’ll just say: admin@tattaway.com. We would actually look it up, don’t just guess.

But just for the sake of getting through this quickly, so that we can see how this all works together in the next video with some real data that I pulled from this video. This is what the process looks like. You just keep going through.

So that’s another one. There’s another broken link here, so I would take the information for Northern Cosmetic Laser Practice. I would add this to the spreadsheet too. This is just what the process looks like.

I’ll close these out and then I would keep going through my search here. The next one on the list would be Cat Tattoo. I would open up Cat Tattoo, and I would click this button – it’s going to check all of the links. There are no invalid links here, so you close it.

BayAreaLaserDoctor.com, I’m going to open this one up, check links. All of the links here are good. Nothing.

That’s what the process looks like. Whenever someone pulls up a bunch of examples and just shows the examples it can start to feel really wrong when you’re doing it yourself, and just like: “this isn’t what it looks like when Ian did it. I must be doing something wrong.”

No, that’s not the case at all. Most of this is just you opening up new tabs. you’re opening it up, you’re clicking it, you’re finding that there are or are not any bad links.

It looks like there’s another bad link here. We would take down the contact information, fill up the spreadsheet for Aurora Plastic Surgery, LLC. We would fill all of these details into here, and then we would just keep going. That’s what the process looks like.

Again, ideally, once you get things on their way, if you’re doing a lot of outreach, ideally you would have a virtual assistant helping with a lot of these tasks that you were paying somewhere between $3-5 an hour, and they were just going.

You could write the articles, and then you could train them how to look up resources for outreach for the Skyscraper method, and you could say: “hey, I want links to this article.” And they would do all the work from there, whether it be Skyscraper method, or the broken linkbuilding, or any other linkbuilding method.

Because this stuff is tedious work and for the most part, it’s pretty unskilled labor. So you could train someone to do it pretty easily. You could even just give them access to these videos and they would be able to learn how to do it pretty easily with a little bit of assistance from you, email or Skype calls back and forth.

Ideally, this is something you hand off in time because it is really tedious. But again, just because it’s tedious, does not mean it’s not worthwhile. When you get these links, it builds your authority so much faster than if you just let it all happen naturally.

They’re definitely worth getting. Don’t forget that. As much as it feels like that’s not the case when you’re going through it, if you’re promoting a really good quality article that you’ve written as a link magnet, whether using this method or the Skyscraper method, and you’re following this training closely, you absolutely should end up with some really high-authority links, which most people take at least 18-24 months to get.

If you’re following this training, you could probably start getting those links within the first 3 to 6 months. That’s going to help a lot with your website authority and your search engine rankings.

That’s that. That’s the process of actually finding these links and filling out the spreadsheet that you’ve been provided. Of course, this spreadsheet is linked below this video, so download it there. The spreadsheet plus the template together are in a compressed file, which you can download.

In the next video, the final video for broken linkbuilding, we’ll go over exactly how these go together. It’s exactly how the Skyscraper method templates worked as well, just with a couple of small differences.

If you have any questions, feel free to write them down, post them to the Facebook group. I’ll keep an eye out for them over there. Otherwise, I will just see you in the next video.

Talk to you then.

In this video I discuss:

• An overview of broken linkbuilding
• How broken linkbuilding applies to what’s shown in this training vs. other pages
• What you need to make sure broken linkbuilding efforts ACTUALLY pay off

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

A1.7 Introduction to Broken Linkbuilding Transcript Below

What’s going on, folks?

So you know everything there is to know about Skyscraper method. Ideally.

If you haven’t watched A1.1 through A1.6 and you’re just skipping ahead to A1.7, or 1.8, or 1.9, don’t do that because there’s some foundational information.

Even If you’re not using the Skyscraper method, which wouldn’t make all a lot of sense to me since it is the BEST method for getting white hat backlinks these days.

But if for some reason you were thinking about skipping ahead, go back because there’s some foundational content in the first 6 videos in this section that are pretty essential to your success in white hat linkbuilding at all.

Assuming you’ve watched the other videos up to this point, we are now going to dig into another method for white hat linkbuilding. And that is Broken Linkbuilding.

Before we dig into the actual how-to, of course I want to give a high-level overview, just so you know what’s coming.

Basically, what Broken Linkbuilding is you want to find authoritative pages in your niche or industry with broken links on them. So they’re linking to pages that are probably no longer there – is usually what a “broken link” is.

Either that’s because the website has gone dead or because that page was moved to somewhere else on another website or somewhere else on the same website. Anyway around it, now they have what’s known as a “broken link” – which is not good for the user experience.

Webmasters, website owners typically don’t like having broken links on their website but it’s not really something that’s easy to notice. If you have a website that’s hundreds or thousands of pages deep, you don’t know when there’s a bad link on one. Unless you do a link analysis regularly – which, I’d say, less than 1%, certainly less than 5%, but probably less than 1% of website owners do.

Essentially, what we’re doing is we’re finding these pages for them as kind of an active charity, we’re doing them a favor, and then we write the website owner to notify them: “hey, you’ve got a broken link or broken links on this page.” And then, you want to request a link to your own resource while they’re updating the page. We’ll see this in the email template within the new couple of videos.

Basically, what you’re saying is: “hey, I found this problem on your website. Really enjoyed the resource page but it’s got a broken link on it, just want to let you know. And hey, by the way, I actually have a really good resource that I think your readers would enjoy. They’re going to go perfectly on that page. While you’re updating it, you may consider adding it, if not, no hard feelings. But it would be pretty cool.”

There’s a linking method too where you can just find people with resource pages and reach out to them and say: “hey, I noticed you had a resource page. Would you mind to add my resource on there too?”

It’s not remotely as effective as if you reach out with an olive branch of doing them the service of finding the broken link, and then asking for a link to your own resource. It’s much, much more effective this way because you are offering value and requesting value in return, at the same time.

Not going to be 100%, right? Nothing is. But it’s definitely more effective than just reaching out and asking for a link.

There are a couple of things that I want you to keep in mind as you’re doing this. We’re going to be covering resources and links pages, mainly. Meaning that the pages we’re going to be looking for are pages that a website owner has put together and said: “hey, here are the links in this industry or resources on other sites that are really helpful to you, my website visitor.”

These are typically high-authority. A lot of the time they’re really high-authority and they’re easier to find broken links because it’s a collection of links where maybe these people have 5, 10, 15, 20+ links on one page.

Whereas a normal piece of content on their website, for one: there’s a ton of them to comb through if you’re looking at a website. On top of that, most of those pages probably aren’t going to have more than 3 or 4 outbound links to other sites. Whereas resource and link pages typically have a lot more links on them, so the statistical likelihood that they’re going to have broken links on them is higher.

It’s also worth noting that this works for all broken links, not just links and resource pages that I’m going to be showing here in this training. If you want to do this for other pages on people’s sites, that’s fine too. But definitely the lowest hanging fruit when you’re looking for broken links is going to be the links and resources pages.

The only other thing that I want to make sure you keep in mind, it’s similar to what I discussed in the Skyscraper method, if the article you’re requesting link to isn’t really high-quality, there’s no way you’re getting the link.

If you have an everyday, fairly average article, or even slightly above average article, it’s not going to be too compelling for them to include on this page of resources that is supposed to be some of the best resources in the industry, in the niche. So if you don’t have a really, really high-quality resource, you’re much less likely to get a backlink.

If you’re doing this, and doing this, you’re going: “man, I’m not getting any results! This stuff sucks!” you may just question whether or not you have a high enough quality resource.

Of course, we discussed that extensively in Lesson A1.3 – how to find the link magnets in your industry that are working really well already and modeling your link magnet after that.

Just make sure you’ve gone through that training. And do a good gut check before you start doing this because this takes a lot of time, takes hours upon hours to even compile the list of people you want to reach out to.

The last thing you want to do is do all of this work, all of this outreach, and the foundation wasn’t set properly because you didn’t have a good enough piece of content that was compelling enough for these website owners to link to from their pages.

That’s that.

That is the bird’s eye view of broken linkbuilding.

We’re going to get into the nitty gritty and I’m going to show you how to find these sites, the tools you need to find these sites, how to do it. And also, just like the Skyscraper method, I have created a spreadsheet and a template that you can use to reach out to these people, and just make it a lot easier on yourself.

One of the hardest things to do is write these templates, especially for people that have never done it before. I’ve already knocked that out for you. We’ll cover that in the next couple of videos as well.

Otherwise, if you have any questions at this point, feel free to post them in the Facebook group, I’ll get to them as soon as I can. Otherwise, I’ll just see you in the next video.